STEVEN TYLER 
If anything, the practice of virtually any celebrity deciding to lay down some musical tracks has been accelerating in recent years; sometimes the results aren’t bad at all actually. On their 2009 Varshons album – made up entirely of covers of mostly unfamiliar songs – the Lemonheads are accompanied by model Kate Moss on one track, Arling & Cameron’s “Dirty Robot”; while actress and model Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and model/singer Bebe Buell) contributed vocals to their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”.
(March 2013)
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Probably the best known version of the song is by Aerosmith; “Train Kept A-Rollin’” is included on their second album, Get Your Wings (1974), but the band’s connection with the song dates back much further than that. As quoted in Wikipedia, Joe Perry recalls of this song: “‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ was the only song we had in common when we first got together. Steven [Tyler]’s band had played ‘Train’, and Tom [Hamilton] and I played it in our band. . . . It’s a blues song, if you follow its roots all the way back. . . . I always thought if I could just play one song, it would be that one because of what it does to me.” Steven Tyler was in a band that opened for the Yardbirds in 1966 and says of their performance (again from Wikipedia): “I had seen the Yardbirds play somewhere the previous summer with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the band. . . . In Westport [at their supporting gig on October 22, 1966] we found out that Jeff had left the band and Jimmy was playing lead guitar by himself. I watched him from the edge of the stage, and all I can say is that he knocked my tits off. They did ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ and it was just so heavy. They were just an un-f--kin’-believable band.” (June 2015) * * * An early example is one of the first big hits by Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”, where most of the vocals are sung much faster than the beat of the music; it is taken from their third album, Toys in the Attic (1975). A decade later, Run-D.M.C. included a remake of “Walk This Way” on their album Raising Hell (1986), with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith sitting in on vocals and guitar, respectively. The two groups also collaborated on a video that was in heavy rotation on MTV. This was one of the first times that rock music and rap music were melded together. (September 2016) |